Bibverify

Verify bibliographic existence and metadata consistency without destructive edits.

Chinese · Install · Quick start · MCP · Development

Bibverify is a BibTeX metadata verification tool for researchers, editors, automation, and AI assistants. It starts with exact DOI, PMID, PMCID, or arXiv identifiers and then scores candidates from title, author, year, venue, and pagination evidence.

Bibverify evaluates whether a bibliographic record can be located in the queried sources and whether its metadata agrees. It does not prove that research findings are true, data is authentic, or a venue is reputable. A missing database record is not evidence that a reference is fabricated. By default, the source .bib file is never overwritten.

Highlights

• Identifier-first lookup for DOI, PMID, PMCID, and arXiv IDs.
• Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, CORE, DBLP, arXiv, bioRxiv, and more.
• Explainable multi-signal matching across identifiers, title, authors, year, venue, and pages. A resolvable DOI with a materially different title becomes identifier_conflict instead of being hidden by title search.
• Structured provider outcomes distinguish a genuine no-match from rate limiting, authentication, network, parsing, and provider failures.
• Non-destructive merging preserves abstract, keywords, file, note, and custom fields that providers do not return; conflicting persistent identifiers are never overwritten automatically.
• A shared connection pool with retries, exponential backoff, and Retry-After support for 429/5xx responses.
• An expiring SQLite cache for successful GET responses; failures are never cached.
• Cross-platform path, encoding, Unicode filename, UTF-8 BOM, and CRLF handling.
• JSON output, stable exit codes, a Python API, and an MCP server built on the official SDK.
• Atomic output writes and byte-preserving backups.

Requirements

• Windows, macOS, or Linux
• Network access to the enabled metadata APIs
• Python 3.11–3.14 when using the Python distribution; npm, containers, and native packages bundle their runtime

GitHub Actions tests all three operating systems across all four supported Python versions.

Install

The current published release is v0.3.0. This branch prepares v0.4.0; commands marked v0.4.0 become usable only after their linked npm, GHCR, or GitHub Release artifact has been published.

Run without a permanent installation:

uvx bibverify --version

Starting with v0.4.0, Node.js users can use the zero-dependency npm launcher. It downloads the matching native release, verifies SHA256SUMS, and forwards every argument and exit code:

npx --yes @hylouis233/bibverify --version
pnpm dlx @hylouis233/bibverify --version
bunx --bun @hylouis233/bibverify --version

For a persistent CLI in an isolated Python environment, use uv tool or pipx:

uv tool install bibverify

pipx install bibverify

Inside a virtual environment, regular pip also works:

python -m pip install --upgrade bibverify